My Backstory

Some readers these days are asking why authors are self-publishing instead of publishing through traditional, big-name publishing houses. This is why:

In 1815, Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra about a message she’d received from her publisher:

Mr. Murray’s letter is come; he is a Rogue, of course, but a civil one. He offers £450 [for the copyright of Emma]—but he wants to have the copyright of MP [Mansfield Park] and S&S [Sense & Sensibility] included. It will end in my publishing for myself, I dare say.

Now, four hundred and fifty pounds was quite a large sum at the time, especially when one considers that upon Jane’s father’s death, Jane, her sister Cassandra, and their mother had been left with an inheritance of only £210 per year between them. But asking for the copyrights to Emma, Mansfield Park, and Sense & Sensibility was an outrageous demand. In response, Mr. Murray received this response (ostensibly from Jane’s brother Henry Austen, as Jane’s status as the author of her novels was still a secret, but I speculate that, since it was Jane who actually penned the dictated letter, she also had a hand in composing its rather snarky content):

Dear Sir

Severe illness has confined me to my Bed ever since I received Yours of ye 15th – I cannot yet hold a pen, & employ an Amuensis [sic]. – The Politeness & Perspicuity of your Letter equally claim my earliest Exertion. – Your official opinion of the Merits of Emma, is very valuable & satisfactory. – Though I venture to differ occasionally from your Critique, yet I assure you the Quantum of your commendation rather exceeds than falls short of the Author’s expectation & my own. – The Terms you offer are so very inferior to what we had expected, that I am apprehensive of having made some great Error in my Arithmetical Calculation. – On the subject of the expense & profit of publishing, you must be much better informed that I am; – but Documents in my possession appear to prove that the Sum offered by you, for the Copyright of Sense & Sensibility, Mansfield Park & Emma, is not equal to the Money which my Sister has actually cleared by one very moderate Edition of Mansfield Park –(You Yourself expressed astonishment that so small an Edit. of such a work should have been sent into the World) & a still smaller one of Sense & Sensibility.

It’s clear that Jane knew what all authors know: a publishing house is a business whose purpose is to make money, and it does so by exploiting authors—and readers—as cleverly as possible.

When my first novel was published Back in 2001, the Big-Name, New York publishing house I was with paid me just $1,250 USD per novel. Even If I’d managed to turn out a book every month, my income would still have fallen below the federal poverty line. But when I began self-publishing my books, I also began to make enough money to live on.

So, that’s why authors are self-publishing these days. That’s why Jane Austen was thinking of self-publishing. That’s why I continue to self-publish today. That’s the benefit to me. But what about you, dear reader?

Is self-publishing good for you?

You bet it is.

Self-published usually cost you much less (mine do). And they can have exciting new plots and characters that would never make it through any of the traditional editorial gauntlets, the ones concerned with producing only what appeals to the masses. Remember, a publisher doesn’t have to please all its readers to make money, just a majority of its readers. Which is why publishing is cyclical. You don’t see many time-travel romances on the shelves these days. Or Gothics. Or vampires. Or Regencies, for that matter. The readers who want those books just aren’t a big enough slice of the publishing pie.

In short, self-publishing gives you, the reader, the stories you love at a fraction of the cost. And your favorite authors can afford to feed their families.

Kat is my first-reader. My editor. My proofreader. She was my co-author on NOT A LADY, back in 2013, writing fully half of that novel. And she will be co-authoring the remaining books of the REGENCY MATCHMAKER SERIES with me.

She also happens to be my daughter.

Kat is currently 22 and his been writing for 2 decades. No, really. She’s truly extraordinary with language, and she always has been. She said her ABC’s at 10 months. She taught herself to read at 2, and she wrote her first story just before she turned 3. She began college at 13 and won the Stephen Caldwell Wright Poetry Award, given by Seminole State College of Florida, when she was just 16, competing against adults. That year, she also won a 3rd place spot in the Flash Fiction category in SSC’s Veritas Awards. And, though I cannot divulge the name under which she publishes fan fiction, I can tell you that she is prolific and her stories there are legendary.

In short, she’s one hell of a good writer.

Kat is also a talented freelance illustrator, having completed several dozen commissions so far this year alone. She has well over 6000 followers on Tumblr, where she posts much of her art. I create all of my own book covers, and Kat is an invaluable critical voice in that process.

As it turns out, Kat and I write extremely well together. We’re very much alike, we use language very similarly, and our writing styles, though different, are compatible. As we do with everything else, we have a great time writing together, and the result is absolutely seamless. You absolutely cannot tell where my writing ends and hers begins. Even we forget, after awhile, who wrote what. Not that it matters, I suppose. What matters is the result, and readers love our combined voice. We’ll be re-issuing NOT A LADY later this year and writing a sequel to it, NOT A GENTLEMAN, which is shaping out to be a personal favorite of mine.

She’s an amazing and good person, and we’re the best of friends. Seriously. We have a great time together, and even if she weren’t my daughter, I would still want to be her friend. She’s funny and wise and socially conscious and honest and sweet. I’m proud of her and grateful to her. For so many things.

My first novel was published in 2001 by Kensington Books as part of its Zebra Regency Romance line. Four years and six more novels later, when Kensington stopped publishing Zebra Regencies, I was invited to continue writing for Kensington, but since my home life was busily falling apart, I elected to stop writing altogether. It’s difficult to write about love when the person you love stops wearing his wedding ring.

Needing a creative outlet, I began to paint. I created and sold over 350 large-scale abstract expressionist paintings. I was discovered by a prestigious art gallery with showrooms in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Dubai, San Francisco, Orlando, and London. The gallery had a deal with a large and well-known cruise line to sell art onboard, and the gallery said it wanted all of the paintings I could produce.

It was a $700,000 a year deal. To say I was over the moon was an understatement. I was somewhere outside of this galaxy. Maybe even outside of this universe.

And then, the Great Recession hit.

Suddenly, no one was buying consumer-level art anymore. My sales tanked. Everyone’s sales tanked. The gallery lost its deal with the cruise line. Then, the gallery closed, taking nine of my paintings with it.

I founded my own online art gallery (at www.DeepUrban.com, for those playing along at home) where I still sell my art. Attempting to make a go of that during the financial crisis, plus a move, a divorce, a courtship, a second marriage, several family health crises, and the raising of two young daughters occupied the balance of the next four years.

And then, in 2012, when the indie publishing revolution was just getting underway, I published my first four books on Kindle and Nook on the advice of a writer friend. She was making a lot more money as an indie than she did when she was traditionally published by a big New York publishing house. Why didn’t I give it a go? she asked.

What did I have to lose? My books were all long out-of-print and just sitting there, doing nothing.

So, I asked my old publisher for my publishing rights back, and I got to work creating new covers. Now, I’m an artist, so creating new covers wasn’t difficult. But I’ll admit that I regarded it as more a labor of love than a necessity, since I suspected that the old saw about people judging books by their covers was mostly hyperbole.

Yowza, was I wrong!

Those covers were good, and they sold a ton of books. To my delight, my indie-published ebooks really took off, ultimately reaching #1 on Amazon’s Top 100 Regency Bestsellers list and #4 on the Historical list. In a year, they’d earned me eleven times as much as they ever earned during the whole time they’d been print-published by my old publisher. I’d started on new novel–it felt so good to be writing again!–and things were going great.

Until Amazon changed my covers.

A few months into my Great Indie Publishing Adventure, the ‘Zon, inexplicably, switched out the covers I’d made, replacing them with the old ones. And because I was busy paying attention to other things, I didn’t notice the switch for two months. It was almost four more months before I could convince Amazon to put the new covers back on. But by that time it was too late. Sales had halved each month for six months. And by the time Amazon finally did put my new covers back on my books, my sales momentum had evaporated. I went from being able to buy a new car with one month’s earnings to barely being able to afford groceries.

I’d been writing a new novel, the first of a new series, and I thought that I could probably re-launch my indie career with it and its sequels, but I couldn’t be sure, and with two young daughters to care for, I needed to be Absolutely Certain we could pay the bills. So I found a teaching job for the coming year.

Annnd…guess what? Teachers don’t have time to write or to promote their just-launched novels. At least, this one didn’t. I taught art and drama that year, a job which required 11 hour days, if I wanted to do it right–and I did. Book sales sank even farther into the loo and stayed there.

Fast forward to 2015. For many reasons, a fresh start was in order. So, with my children and husband, I fulfilled a dream I’d had for years, moving from Florida to the Pacific Northwest, where we now live on the edge of the Wild, in the foothills of the beautiful Cascade mountains. Life has finally settled down enough for me to turn my attention back to writing.

But how does one go about re-launching a traditional-turned-indie-turned-stale writing career? I wondered. And I googled. And I found good stuff for indie-newbies from the likes of Joe Konrath, Nick Stephenson, David Gaughran, Chris Fox, and Derek Murphy, amongst others. They don’t have a lot of information to offer writers in my situation. Indie publishing is new enough that there aren’t a lot of writers whose sales took off, tanked, and were subsequently revived.. But, following their advice, I’ve cobbled together what I believe is a sound plan of action for myself, including a couple of new ideas of my own that I’ll be testing. Annnd…I’m launching my writing career. For the third time.

Which means I’m writing again. A lot.

This month, I’m releasing a box set of the first four books of my Regency Matchmaker Series. Over the next five months, I’ll be re-releasing three backlist titles and launching two brand-new titles. And then the plan is to release a new title about every 1 to 3 months thereafter, depending upon length.

So, I’m not quite starting from scratch, but I am re-launching my writing career. Leap, and the net shall appear! I’ll be blogging about the process, and I invite you to watch what happens. It may be a train wreck, and it may be fireworks, but either way, it should be interesting. 🙂